Lawrence O’Donnell opened the Thursday night broadcast of his MSNBC show, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell with a fiery takedown of his network and other outlets. O’Donnell blasted the media for their handling of Donald Trump and failing to fact-check the presidential candidate’s statements with immediacy
O’Donnell aimed his opening monologue on Donald Trump’s recent news conference from his Mar-A-Lago residence which aired in full on several networks and dominated the news cycle in ways that the Trump campaign has scrambled to do in the passing weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris has hit the campaign trail.
In what many described as a rambling and disjointed affair, Trump riffed and aimed attacks at Vice President Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, while rattling off several debunked claims and bizarre statements. At one point, the former president stated that a speech delivered in front of the White House on January 6, 2021, was larger than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963, which was categorically false.
About the news conference, O’Donnell said, “It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks tried to play catchup with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless. No network even attempted to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told.”
It didn’t end there as O’Donnell added,” “Many of the falsehoods Donald Trump spread today in his responses came from that vast well of stupidity that takes up most of his brain. The stupidest person who has ever won a nomination for president stood there in front of those reporters and said his opponent isn’t smart enough to do what he was failing at right in front of those reporters.”
O’Donnell shared on his personal X account that he went off the intended script, speaking from the heart about the matter as he’s done repeatedly in his time in his post. You can see his reply on X and the video below.
Here’s the whole thing. What I said tonight was a muted version of what I was actually feeling, even when I threw the script which surprised me too. https://t.co/lmypzkHfPh
— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) August 9, 2024
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Photo: Getty